Jerusalem rocked by two suspected Palestinian attacks

Jeffrey Heller

Jerusalem: A Palestinian killed an Israeli and overturned a bus with a construction vehicle and a gunman wounded a soldier in attacks in Jerusalem that appeared to be a backlash against Israel's Gaza war.

There were no passengers on the bus, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of the city. Surveillance video broadcast on Israeli television showed the yellow excavator's mechanical arm tearing into the side of the bus as it lay on the sidewalk.

Police identified the driver of the digger as a Palestinian from East Jerusalem and described the incident as a terrorist attack. Police officers shot him dead, and TV footage showed the man's body hanging out of the excavator's cabin.

The funeral of Avraham Walles, killed in the attack in Jerusalem. Photo: Getty Images

Several hours later on Monday, near the city's Hebrew University, a gunman fired at a soldier, wounding him in the stomach. Police said the assailant then jumped on a waiting motorcycle and sped away.

"We very much suspect that this was a terrorist attack," Jerusalem district police chief Yossi Parienti told Channel Two television in Israel.

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The attacks came after Israel called a seven-hour humanitarian truce in some parts of Gaza while continuing to strike targets elsewhere in the Hamas-run territory.

The offensive in Gaza, which Israel says is intended to quash rocket salvoes fired by militants and destroy cross-border tunnels used to stage attacks, has been the deadliest in the territory since Israeli settlers and soldiers left in 2005. More than 1800 Palestinians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians, according to Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qedra.

A high alert was also called in Tel Aviv. Police set up road blocks in the city, causing widespread congestion, although they were later removed.

Tensions have been high in Jerusalem for the past month over the Gaza war and the killing of a Palestinian teen in the city by alleged Israeli assailants out to avenge the deaths of three abducted Israeli youngsters in the occupied West Bank.

A Palestinian man in the midst of Israeli police officers, who are guarding the home of the man who rammed a digger into a bus. Photo: AFP

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for Monday's attacks in Jerusalem.

But a spokesman for Hamas, the dominant group in the Gaza Strip, said: "We praise the heroic and brave operations in Jerusalem, which come as a natural reaction to the crimes and massacres by the occupation against our people in Gaza."

Police and onlookers at the scene of the crime in Jerusalem. Photo: AFP

Describing the excavator incident, Mr Parienti said the vehicle "hit a Jewish citizen at a construction site and then drove about 50 metres down the road, where it overturned the bus with its arm, slightly injuring three people".

Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said the nearly four-week-old Gaza war had raised fears of attacks in Israeli cities.

"From the moment fighting started in the south, we realised such an incident of a lone attacker can happen, and such tractor attacks are familiar in Jerusalem," he said on Channel 2.

"[The driver's] whole family is being interrogated. We want to know who sent him, if he was acting alone, whether he belonged to a network - all those things are being checked," he said.